thirteen update ☀️🥀🪰🏚️
chapter 6: march
summary:
(“Be here. For Adrien.”
“Emilie, I can’t…”
“For me, then. Love him for my sake.”)
A sob cracked open Adrien’s chest. He ripped away from the wall, clapping a hand over his mouth to try and stifle himself. His lungs wheezed, a crumpled can, and the world slipped off its axis.
She was dying. She was dying. She was dying, for real, and soon, and this was what they hadn’t wanted to tell him.
excerpt:
Time barrelled on after that, like a ground speeding toward him in freefall.
Lessons slipped through his head and smiles stretched over his mouth and Adrien’s life became, more than ever before, defined by the moment he would next see Maman. It was like his brain couldn’t catch hold of anything else, couldn’t grasp it. Even when he was out doing other things, in other places, he wasn’t really. He was always back with her.
The shift happened sometime in the beginning of March.
A change in the air, the bones. The house held its breath. Walls stood cleaner and quieter and bigger than before. Or maybe Adrien just got smaller. Maybe it was like a vacuum, like he’d learned about in physics. All the air sucked out of his lungs, crumpled up like a can.
The silence was the worst. When Adrien was gone, he could lose himself a little. Turn his brain off at photoshoots and fall into the monotony of fabric on his body, skin on his face, hands all over, fixing him and fixing him and fixing him. Dissolve into the rhythm of fencing, blocking and thrusting and parrying and sweating and not thinking not thinking not thinking. But being inside the house was different. He couldn’t do anything but think, couldn’t be anyone but himself. Even his shows started to fall flat; Adrien found himself restarting the same Ouran episode ten times because he hadn’t absorbed a thing. The house was so quiet, his brain so loud. The world was transparent and he wasn’t quite sure he was real.
And then he would see Maman.
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Saeyoung and Eunji by @/tsang_fei
Light filters through the windows of her dance studio like springtime in her childhood home: warm, symmetrical squares of sunlight streaming through the curtains, singing her name, beckoning her outdoors. It's the tender scent of seasons changing, the whisper of warmer days to come.
This is a soft place. He made it that way for her.
"Still working, starshine?"
Saeyoung slips into place behind her, arms snaking around her waist, smiling lips brushing her shoulder. The flannel shirt she bought him signifies the months that have passed since he hid in his hoodie, headphones over his ears, eyes bathed in blue light, head in outer space, heart in her hands.
She is longer surprised by the silent way he sneaks up on her.
"I had no idea you were here."
He scans her screen, running one finger experimentally across her keyboard, never quite touching the keys.
"I don't know much about jobs other than the one I have," he says, pausing for a moment before correcting himself quietly: "had." Eunji smiles, leaning back against his chest, listening to his heart. "I did imagine dancers did a lot more dancing," he continues thoughtfully, "and a lot less typing."
She laughs, delighted whenever her brilliant boyfriend is stumped by the intricacies of her life.
"Everything's in English," she says, sighing. "My resume, my website, all of my information. It's useless if I want to work here."
Saeyoung stands taller behind her, peering over her shoulder more intently now.
"You want me to do it?" he asks. "I could translate it faster."
"I'm better at English than you are," she says. It's the only thing she has over him.
"And I'm better at Korean," he teases. "And probably translating too."
For some reason, this frustrates her.
"I'm working, baby. Just let me—okay?"
Saeyoung goes quiet and she forces herself to focus. She can't remember the Korean words for "immersive" or "improvisation."
She deletes the whole line. His arms tighten around her waist.
"Thank you," he whispers. His breath dusts her cheek and her fingers freeze over the keys. It's taken him ages to learn to say thank you instead of I'm sorry. "It's like you're starting all over for my sake."
He's right, and he isn't. He's smart, and he's got it all wrong.
"I wanted to," she tells him, giving up on the resume, twisting so she can stare straight into his sharp eyes. "You gave me a reason."
He slips his hands into the pockets of her overalls and kisses her once, swiftly, softly.
"Don't work so hard," he says. She laughs, loud and raucous like a child, because she's said those same words to him hundreds of times.
The past is a world away, text she wrote when she didn't know who she was becoming, sun on her skin, fragments of songs she barely remembers. Her future is fingers on keys and bright white windows, socks on the marley floor, sentences woven from words in two languages, the boy at her side.
"Just a little longer," she tells him.
She's almost there.
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Heyy!!! Glad to see you pop in!!!
Loceit brainrot is so true and real. I should actually go through your uni au i never did 🤔
And also [shaking you] if you dont tell us abt crowns and cutlasses i will scream abt it forever.
Hows your life going lexi?
Erri hello!!!! I think about the uni au a lot so if you ever do go through it let me know lol, and I promise I will actually tell you all about CC asap </3
Life is going pretty well!! I’ve gotten into D&D in the last year-ish and it’s taken up most of my creative free time (playing and DMing, which is HARD by the way oh my god), but I’m graduating college this semester (also oh my god) and it’s actually not going as bad as I thought it would lmao! Still not writing as much as I’d like but that is life i suppose - how are you???
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im applying to grad school (again) for history and im wondering how I academically say I want to study arctic exploration in a way that shows humans have always been humans, and the way these people held each other in the cold, tried to keep their frozen eyelids open, brought food and cared for the dying even as their own heartbeats ebbed. In the rawest form of human suffering, where death holds out it's skeletal hands and they instead replied "Not yet, I'm only twenty-three and have a friend to keep warm."
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